Increased access to the Internet in recent years has expanded the potential customer-base of sellers of goods and services by geometric proportions, leading to a concomitant increase in Internet-based commerce—particularly in the field of online auctions. This expanded customer-base has also increased the use of group buying power. That is, selling the same product to a group of customers at one time over the Internet generally decreases a merchant's customer-acquisition costs and, as a result, allows them to lower the price of the product.
Currently known methods for providing such auctions and online market-places are, however, unsatisfactory in a number of respects. For example, the established systems for conducting online auctions are only suitable for selling products where there is only one term of relevance, i.e., the price. This is because in most auctions the sole subject of bidding is price. These and other currently known systems are not suitable for use in connection with the auction of a product or service which has multiple aspects of value, and for which there are a number of variable terms.
In a credit card offering, for example, different people may assign a different value to the long-term interest rate, the introductory APR, the length of the payment grace period, the minimum monthly payment, and any applicable incentive program. The results of bidding focused on one aspect of the product offering will generally benefit the customers valuing that aspect more than it will benefit the other customers.
In addition, some merchants may not be able to, or may not wish to, offer the same product or service to certain customers. This may be due to a number of factors, for example, licensing or legal restrictions. Certain software resellers, for example, may only be licensed to sell products to customers located in specific geographical regions. A second reason may relate to profitability; i.e., the profitability of a customer may be determined or estimated based on certain demographics of the customer. The profit associated with selling life insurance, for example, usually varies according to the age and health of the customer. Similarly, a lender's decision as whether and under what conditions to loan money to a customer usually depends on annual income, credit score, and other such demographics.
For these and other reasons it becomes difficult, if not impossible, to treat different customers in the same manner. Therefore the traditional auction format is generally unfeasible or undesirable for merchants to bid on groups of customers having such differences.
Another limitation of current auction formats is that customers must wait while others sign up to participate, or wait for the expiration of lengthy rounds of bidding, which are often conducted over a period of days or weeks via electronic mail.
Methods are therefore needed in order to overcome these and other limitations of the prior art.